


The Worth Of A Woman

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, POV Outsider, Sacrifice, Sorry Not Sorry, This Is Not The Happy Ending You're Looking For
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4746998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter knows her own worth. But this is Maria Hill. She doesn't appreciate how she is appreciated. [COMPLETE]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sif finds him standing by the window, looking out into the dark night of the city.

“How many hours have you been here?”

“Too many,” Thor answers without looking around. “And not enough.”

Mjolnir sits on the medlab table, dull silver and soft leather, near-incomprehensible power for an Asgardian, unthinkable for one of Midgard. And yet, as it turns out, not just thinkable but wieldable.

“You believe you should have stopped her.”

He laughs, and it has a bitter quality to it. While Odin disapproves of Thor’s association with Midgard, there can be no doubt that her old playmate has grown beyond all measure these last few years: his pride appropriate, his spirits redirected, his temper tempered. “Mortal hands were not made to wield Mjolnir. This is why.”

Sif looks at the woman lying in the bed, still and silent and pale. Commander Hill was already weary when she came to Asgard requesting help. Carved down to the core of her endurance, still she showed strength of will and character and mind among mortals. Now, the Midgardian seems unspeakably fragile.

“She chose the responsibility. And Mjolnir chose her.” Sif can still remember the shock and awe, and the brief sting of jealousy as she watched the human woman claim the right to wield Mjolnir – _why her_? “What I know of her suggests she would neither regret her action nor accept your self-flagellation.”

Thor turns and stares at her, somewhat disbelieving, before he smiles, a rueful twist to his mouth. “As always, you cut to the heart.”

Sif shrugs. “I would not withhold my life if the price of it was peace for those I loved. Why would she count her worth any less?”


	2. Chapter 2

Tony Stark is the last person Helen expects to see in the workroom. And yet, he stands in the door with a tray of two drinks – one a thick dark green, the other lilac with dark purple globes in the base.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says when she stares at him. “I’m just Pepper’s messenger. She says you haven’t had lunch, you need to eat something, and you’re welcome.”

Helen looks back at her work, self-conscious. “I am not hungry, thank you.”

“And I repeat; I’m just the messenger.” 

_ Stark has the soul of a bully, _ Maria said once,  _ and the heart of a little boy who never felt he was good enough. _

Helen pushes the memory away, codes in another diagnostic for the cradle, and taps ‘execute’ even as Stark rattles the cup at her. “I don’t have time to eat, Mr. Stark,” she snaps. “I need to understand what went wrong.”

“Maybe nothing did.”

“The cradle should have fixed everything that was hurt in her. We got to her well in time, the regenerated tissue is perfectly healthy. But she hasn’t woken—”

“Doc. Drink.”

Annoyed with him, with herself, with the technology that failed her friend, Helen takes a grudging sip. Taro-flavoured milk tea, with sago pearls, just as she likes it.

“You know,” Stark says after a slurp of his own drink, “the coma might have nothing to do with her body. Wielding the Hammer isn’t about strength. I should know.”

_ Whosoever be worthy _ ...

Helen swallows the sago spheres along with sudden bitter failure. “But I can’t do anything for her spirit,” she says, and knows it for foolishness.

Maria needs nothing for her spirit and never did.


	3. Chapter 3

When Pepper encounters Natasha in the elevator, the other woman carries a familiar small striped box of candy, and the button for Maria’s floor is already lit up.

“Dried and sugared limes?” Pepper asks.

“She likes them,” is the explanation Natasha gives as they walk out past the sensors and the nurses, and into the room with the pale patient in the single, solitary bed.

Pepper studies the silent and still form of her friend, her mouth pinching with anger. Maria ended a war that should never have started, and however much Pepper loves Tony, and considers the Avengers her friends, there’s a part of her that wants to slap them all for their blind wilfulness.

Soft jazz wafts through the room, light and lively, like a summer’s eve. It’s cut by the crackle of cellophane as Natasha unwraps the box. The aroma of spiced citrus joins the music in the air.

“Hey, Hill,” Natasha murmurs, picking out a piece of sugared lime and waving it under Maria’s nose, “if you don’t wake up, I’m going to eat this box all by myself.”

As she bites into the lime, she offers the box to Pepper. The piece of fruit is rough and firm, and bits of the crystalline sugar coating it patter back into the box, but it smells beautiful. The flavour sings on Pepper’s tongue, sugar offset by the tart fruit, but it doesn’t quite disguise the sadness in Pepper’s chest.

Maria should be enjoying this herself.

“Dr. Cho says she’s perfectly healthy,” Natasha says. “She’ll make it.”

Even to Pepper it sounds like the other woman is trying to convince herself. “She has to want to make it,” Pepper murmurs.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam turns up the music so it fills the room. He has an hour to spare, and Maria needs company. Well, maybe not _needs_. But he wants to sit with her, occasionally reading the better passages of this story out loud and not thinking of where it all went wrong.

The elevator heralds an arrival, along with brisk footsteps down the corridor, and a quick rap on the doorjamb.

Sam’s spine stiffens as Colonel Rhodes looks in. “Wilson. No change?”

“Not since I’ve been here, which is only the last hour.” Sam hesitates, but this isn’t about rank or their choice of allegiance – this is about Maria and their friendships with her. “They ran an MRI on her this morning – portable, ex-S.H.I.E.L.D design. Her brain-scans aren’t typical of a coma, but then, nobody knows what wielding the Hammer does to humans.”

Rhodes snorts. “Aliens, androids, and women. It makes you think.”

“That maybe us guys been doing it wrong all these years?” Sam never tried his hand at the Hammer – never really wanted to, either. Sure, it’d be a kick to be king of the universe, but he's not so sure he could trust himself not to make a mess of it.

“She’d smile to hear that.”

Sam looks at the silent woman in the bed, thinks the stillness is rather worse than watching her convulse in the throes of the power storm. “I’d be more than happy to see her smile right now.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not alone in that.” Rhodes sighs after a moment. “Although, I’m not looking forward to one part of her waking up.”

“No?”

“She’s going to kick our asses when she does.”


	5. Chapter 5

Steve doesn’t turn when Bucky leans the metal shoulder against the wall and peers in through the viewing window. “No change?”

“No.”

Not for the first time, Steve wonders why he’s here; why he thinks that staring at Maria’s face will make her lashes lift, why he thinks that her waking up will make everything right again.

“We fucked up.”

 _Now_ Steve turns to look at Bucky – the only person who’s dared to say that to him; the only person he’ll accept the criticism from. “They were going to turn us into numbers.”

“Newsflash, buddy. Most of us have always been numbers.” Bucky heaves himself off the wall and touches the glass with one hand, looking through at the woman beyond. “So, just between you and me: was it worth it?”

If Steve closes his eyes, he can still see the condemnation and disgust in blue eyes before she turned to seal the chamber door behind her. He can still see the way her knuckles went white around Mjolnir as the Revanche device lit up. He can still see her outline writhing in incandescent fire.

_Whosoever holds this hammer, if she be worthy, shall wield the power of Thor..._

It needed power to activate it and humanity to make it through the fire.

Was it worth it?

In the end, there’s only one answer to give; only one answer that counts.

“She thought it was.”


	6. Chapter 6

At their first meeting, Maria Hill was blunt.

 _You’ll want to know, of course,_ she told Wanda, looking her in the eye with a cold blue gaze. _So find out. And then stay out._

The blankness of the woman in the bed is as unlike the burning protectiveness Wanda glimpsed that day as an asteroid is to the ferocious heart of a sun. It shakes her enough that she barely hears the footsteps at the door, and only realises she has company when Barton steps into the room.

“So,” says Barton from the doorway, “you also fretting over what you should have done or what you could have done?”

“Neither.” She meets his gaze as he comes to stand on the other side of the bed. “You?”

He pokes Maria’s hip, an almost experimental nudge, as though he expects her to wake up and protest. Wanda feels a pang at the gesture – even after a year, it sometimes takes her, unexpected.

Perhaps that’s why she blurts, “You think of her as a sister.”

Barton looks up sharply, tense. It’s a moment before he relaxes and then he seems to slump. “For all the good it did her.”

There’s no response she can think to give, and the silence stretches until Barton leans down with his arms resting on the bed-rail, his fingers loosely laced. “We did what we thought was right; she did what she had to do to prove us wrong. What she did came with a price; she paid it.”

“That seems…cold.”

Barton’s gaze flicks up, then drops back to Maria’s face. “Maybe. But this was always going to be her destiny, fighting to protect her own.”

And, that simply, Wanda understands. “Both the Avengers and the world.”


	7. Chapter 7

The others cling to hope, citing human odds and the human spirit; even the Asgardians tell tales of the strength of spirits, of unbeatable odds defeated. But Vision sees the birth of the universe behind his eyelids, and he knows what was wrought in the Revanche Mechanism – and the cost of unmaking it.

_No more heroes anymore._

Did she know when she enclosed herself in the chamber and wielded the pure destructive power of Mjolnir – mortal frailty wielding immortal power in a machine designed to burn the humanity out of the gods and turn them into monsters of heart?

Yes, Vision thinks, Maria Hill knew.

 _The world will always need heroes. That doesn’t mean I like it._ She’d been working late in the facility, but spared time to speak with him, even though he made her uncomfortable – too much power, too much knowledge, and perhaps also too much innocence for her ease. _Don’t imagine I’m being polite,_ she’d said at the end. _I need to know what you’re capable of when it comes to the crunch._

“Capable of pride, and stubbornness, and foolishness,” he says into the silence of her bedside. “Capable of forgetting ourselves.”

In the midst of this ‘uncivil war’, a mere woman had remembered what heroes had pushed aside in the fight for their rights: that pride must sometimes be put aside for the protection of the weak. And the cost of their forgetfulness had been her life.

_A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts._

There is a bitterness to truth; Vision has always known this. And yet, the taste of it in his mind and his mouth is a new sensation.

Even androids, it seems, have their arrogance.

**fin**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you're wondering what the Revanche Mechanism is. I don't actually know. It turned up halfway through the story and I only have the sketchiest understanding of it myself. Things (devices, people, plotbunnies) do this when I'm writing.


End file.
